


Hic Sunt Dracones

by emynii, ObliObla



Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [8]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Gen, Hurt Mazikeen (Lucifer TV), Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 04, Stabbing, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 19:37:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20953814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: Sometimes family is more than blood.For the Whumptober prompt: stab wound





	Hic Sunt Dracones

After all that shit with Lucifer and Dromos and _Eve,_ all Maze wanted was to get blitzed and let loose a little.

And so it was that she found herself a dozen shots in, holding up a somewhat wasted Linda while Ella told them about… something.

Dragons, she’d said. Maybe. Maze was fairly certain she knew more than Ella did about dragons.

“But he was a _white_ dragon, right? So ice breath _all_ over the place,” Ella said, waving her arms around. “Thankfully, my tiefling bard dodged out of the way, pulled out her lute, and—”

“I fought a dragon once,” Maze said. She could still feel the heat of its breath brushing over her skin.

”Whoa… You play?” Ella asked, picking up another shot and downing it.

Maze considered this. “Sometimes I like to play with my food before I eat it.”

“That’s so cool. _You’re_ so cool.” Her eyes were bright and shining.

“Yeah, sure,” Maze said, grabbing another shot.

“So what kind of—?”

“I’m tired!” Linda announced. She crossed her arms, and laid her head down on them.

_Humans_, Maze thought with exasperation (with fondness). No stamina. She got up and pulled Linda with her. “Come on, then.”

She managed to wrangle both of them out into the alley, heading back to Linda’s car to drive them home. Someone was already outside the door, smoking, leaning against the brick wall. When they tried to walk past, he dropped his cigarette, brushed his lanky, blond hair from his face, and stepped into their path, slouching.

“Fuck off,” Maze said gruffly.

The man chuckled. “Hello, sister,” he said.

_Oh, fuck._

_“This_ is your brother?” Ella blurted, stumbling into Maze from behind.

Linda, still half-conscious, stirred.

Maze stepped forward, shoving the humans behind her. “Brother,” she said shortly. She kept her expression neutral, but inside her chest was tight. Which brother could this be? And what did it mean that he was _here?_

Behind Maze, Linda seemed to come back to herself a little, pulling away, standing on her own.

“Hey, what’s your name, Maze’s bro?” Ella asked cheerfully.

The demon tilted his head, glancing between Maze and Ella.

“Oh, you don’t recognize me?” he asked gleefully, when Maze remained silent, twisting a strand of his greasy hair between his fingertips, rubbing them together in a gesture that seemed suddenly familiar. “You don’t remember your favorite little brother?”

The insufferably ingratiating posture; the gesture, a sign of his missing horn; and the annoying way in which he spoke made the demon’s identity infuriatingly obvious. _Keza._ Maze grimaced internally. A worthless demon, by all accounts: weak, sniveling, young enough Maze hardly remembered him from any other of those useless whelps, though she did recall the way he used to blink up at her with his yellow eyes shot through with gold. Maze growled and shook her head, dismissing the vision. “What the hell are you doing here, Keza?”

He barked out a laugh. “Funny you should mention ‘Hell’...”

She rolled her eyes. “Did Lucifer send you?” she asked, but she was scanning the alley for exits, checking Keza’s hands for weapons. It had almost been a game among those vicious little shits—getting the jump on her while she was distracted by innumerable other things.

He shrugged. “In a manner of speaking.”

Fuck Keza and _fuck_ the half-truths he’d picked up from Lucifer. Lucifer would _never_ have sent a demon as volatile as _this_, especially when it meant breaking one of his cardinal rules.

Maze spread her legs slightly, as subtly as she could manage, shifting her center of gravity forward, her fingers itching to go for her knife.

“So,” she asked distractedly, preparing to leap, “what task has he set _you_?”

“To deliver a message,” he said, scuffing his boot against the ground. Behind her, Maze could hear Linda whispering to Ella, trying to pull her away.

“What’s the message?”

Keza sprang forward, suddenly, a knife appearing in his hand almost faster than Maze could register. But she had taught him everything he knew and wasn’t about to be caught off guard by this particular shithead of a sibling. Maze shoved Linda and Ella back, but she lost too much time to the motion, losing her advantage. She shouted wordlessly as Keza pressed her against the wall, knife against her throat.

“Dromos says hi,” he whispered, and went for the slice that she had taught him, all those years ago: deep enough to catch the windpipe but wide enough to sever the jugular. The knife cut into Maze’s skin for an instance before her leg shot out, hooking around one of his legs and dragging them both to the ground.

“Run!” she yelled, rolling them, grabbing Keza’s wrist, bending it back until the fingers went slack and the knife fell to the ground, but he grabbed her by the hair with the other hand and slammed her into the wall.

She tasted blood and hissed, using the wall as leverage to throw herself back at Keza, pulling out her own blade. She made a gash in his side, but he didn’t even notice, pinning her to the asphalt. He smelled like cigarettes, sweat, _human_ as he loomed over her. “We will never stop fighting Lucifer,” he muttered almost wildly, eyes wide and intense. “We will bind him in adamant, but _you_ don’t have to worry.”

She bucked, trying to throw him, but he pinned one of her arms under his leg, and shoved her, hard, back to the ground. 

“You’ll already be dead,” he whispered.

She snarled, wrapped her legs around his chest, and rolled them to the side. She shouted as she yanked her arm out from under him, her fingers still tight around her knife’s hilt. She jammed the blade into his side, piercing between the ribs as the knife was designed to do.

The tang of blood was sharp in the cooling air, but Keza was still fighting, scratching and kicking at her.

She tried to pull away, but he ripped the knife from his side and dived at her, heedless of the blood pouring from his side. Damn his current inability to feel pain. In Hell, he was an easy opponent, quickly cowed and made to fall in line. But Maze had never had time to focus on any sibling for long, and his grown fighting style was unknown to her.

She felt pain, white-hot and throbbing, echo from her stomach, but she ignored it, scrambling at the ground, picking up his smaller knife. But anything could be lethal if used properly, and she managed to regain her feet before he leapt at her again, snatching his hand out of the air, using his momentum to slam him against the wall, and pressing the blade to his throat.

“Do it, Mazi,” he breathed, air choked off by her forearm.

She traced the path against his neck, across the jugular, cutting off the windpipe. Her focus shifted, and she saw him as he had been, back in Hell, back before even Lucifer, hardly more than a whelpling, his horns barely nubs as he yanked at the hem of her leather vest, just another hungry mouth in a sea of them.

Weakness overtook her for a moment, but she pushed it down, ignored Keza’s further prodding, and drew the knife across his throat. He sputtered, and blood flecked against her face before she dropped him to the ground, his eyes wide and staring and lifeless.

She breathed roughly, fingers clenched against the bricks.

“Maze, _Maze!”_ Linda called, hurrying down the alleyway.

“I told you to _run,”_ Maze said, but her voice came out weak and almost breathy.

“I wouldn’t just— Is that a _knife_…?” Linda pulled at her shirt.

She looked down and saw the knife, _her_ knife, sticking out of her side. “Fuck.” She had been too weak, too slow.

“Is he...is he…?”

“Back in Hell,” Maze said shortly, spitting blood onto the ground. “Lucifer needs to get his goddamn house in order.”

Linda blinked at her, opening her mouth, but seeming to not have any words.

There was a patter of footsteps and Ella was standing next to Linda, rocking back and forth anxiously. “Wait, so does that mean…” She trailed off, blinking rapidly.

Maze ignored her, trying to stand up straight. The pain throbbed from her side down her limbs and back again.

Ella inhaled sharply. “Does-does that mean you’re an _actual_ demon—”

Maze hissed, exploring the edges of the wound with her fingertips. It didn’t seem to have hit any major organs.

“—and-and ‘forged in the bowels of Hell to torture the guilty for all eternity’?!”

“Ella, Maze got stabbed,” Linda said, voice high pitched and worried. “Not now, please?”

“Right.” Ella nodded rapidly. “Right, right. Okay. It’s just that everything I ever believed is real and God definitely, _definitely_ exists and—”

Maze grunted and pulled the knife out, turning away from the wall, away from the empty human shell.

“Maze!” Linda hissed. “You’ll bleed out.”

Maze snorted. “I’ve had worse.” The pain was almost comforting in its familiarity. The ache of the wound was so much easier than whatever was tightening her chest and making her eyes burn.

“We have to get you to the hospital,” Linda said in a rush.

“Ugh, I’d rather get stabbed again.” She couldn’t be surrounded by all these humans any longer. They kept making her feel these annoying _feelings_, and she didn’t have time for it right now. Not when she was wounded, when she needed to be stronger than ever. Weakness was death. She turned away from them and started stalking down the alley, but she stumbled, and fell against the bricks.

“Maze!”

Linda and Ella rushed forward and caught her by the arms.

“Get off,” Maze muttered, but her voice was faint, and she tipped forward, landing on her knees. She touched the wound again, and her fingers came away dripping red. She looked up at Ella and Linda. “I’ve gotten soft!” she said harshly, trying to ignore all the ways she’d _been_ soft, and for years now.

Ella’s eyes filled with tears, but Linda just shook her head, pulling out her phone. “You’re not alone anymore.”

Maze tried to drag herself up to stand, but something pulled in her side, and in the wave of pain she toppled forward, scraping her face against the asphalt. The world went dark.

* * *

Everything sounded muffled, as though through an ash storm. Maze couldn’t feel the asphalt under her cheek, under her hands. She couldn’t focus on anything, and no longer knew where Ella and Linda were. Her back was exposed, and she tried to turn over, but she couldn’t move. 

She was helpless.

She heard talking, vaguely, the voices panicked, but she couldn’t lift her head. She felt hands grabbing at her, lifting her, and a soft, soothing voice over her head. It felt _wrong_, and she tried to kick out, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate.

“You’ll be okay,” someone said, but she couldn’t believe them. She was placed on a softer surface, on her uninjured side,but she still couldn’t feel it. She pulled her arms in, wrapped them around herself as best she could, to try to protect all her soft parts. There was so much softness. Her skin under her fingertips was cold; everything was cold. She couldn’t—

Someone pressed on one of her wounds, and she would have cried out from the pain if she’d had breath. She wanted to repel the attackers, but her strength failed her. She curled in further on herself; she couldn’t fight anymore. There were hands in her hair, and she didn’t understand this tenderness. No one had ever...

Darkness swept over her again, reaching out with its claws, and, though she was a creature of the night, the wounds were sharp and aching.

“She said no hospital,” someone said, and Maze caught a whiff of something that raised her hackles by instinct: divinity. She dragged herself from the darkness, but still couldn’t open her eyes.

“Fuck off, angel,” she muttered.

“You need the hospital,” Amenadiel told her in that infuriatingly earnest way he had.

She gritted her teeth, trying to hold her focus. “Can’t,” she managed, then, breath gone from her again, only managed to whisper, “_humans_.”

He shook his head—she felt the air from the motion buffer her face, bringing with it the scent of the heavenspawn and the faint odor of milk. The whelps had always been hungry, grabbing at her, screeching until she found the next kill. And the next. The next… She shook herself from her thoughts.

“I’ll be _fine,_” she said roughly. She tried to sit up, but fell back to the seat with a cry. She hissed, cursing her body for its weakness. “I’ll heal.” She always did. She lost the thread of concentration for a moment and felt her glamour flicker, gasps coming in its wake.

Linda hadn’t ever seen, and Ella…

“Take her back to the house, Linda,” Amenadiel said.

“_Please_,” she said under her breath, so Amenadiel couldn’t hear. “Just take me... home.” The word was uncertain, after all that had happened, and nausea rose, bile coating the inside of her teeth.

“Okay, Maze,” Linda said. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

Maze stood, back straight and stiff, while Lilith regarded her with a cold eye.

“You have failed me, daughter,” she said.

Maze wondered if her mother even remembered her name. She bowed her head the least that was still considered respectful. “I have,” she said shortly. It hardly mattered that she hadn’t had sufficient resources, that the Lilim had been ill-positioned in Hell for decades. But she was the eldest, the face of their failures; she had always been the face of their failures.

“This will not be tolerated much longer.”

Would she kill her, like the more rebellious of her siblings? Those whelps Maze had reared herself when Lilith had abandoned them in turn, as she abandoned everyone?

If she tried, she’d have a hell of a fight on her hands.

Maze bit back her angrier response, and said, flatly, “Provide me with more provisions and troops, and maybe that will change.”

“You should be grateful for what you’ve been given,” Lilith said, already turning away.

“It’s not enough!” And no one yelled at Lilith, not if they expected to still have their hide. But Maze squared her shoulders. “Your children die by the _scores_, and you expect gratitude.”

“I _expect_ obedience,” she said icily. 

Maze shook her head. “No,” she breathed.

“What?”

“No,” she said louder. “You’ve given me _nothing._”

“I gave you life.”

Maze laughed. “That’s it?”

Lilith scowled and a flash of something like pain crossed over her face. “Creation will give you _nothing _but your life; anything else you must take for yourself!”

Maze grimaced. “Then I’ll take my freedom.” She turned and made to walk away.

“Freedom doesn’t exist,” her mother said, voice cutting as it always was. “You will forever be beholden to someone.”

Maze bit her lip. “Anyone but you.” The wide expanse of the wastelands stood before her, dangerous, certainly, but aching with something that tasted like freedom.

“You will never find _anyone _who cares for you like this family,” Lilith hissed as Maze passed her siblings, everyone she’d ever known, watching her with faces pale with fear or twisted in anger. Or else flattened by an indifference she’d never know the truth of.

“I’ll take my chances,” she whispered. She didn’t look back. The great swamp reared in front of her, and she was drowned by the stinking blackness, no longer able to breathe.

* * *

“It’s really true, isn’t it?” Maze heard Ella whisper, as if from the end of a long tunnel. “She’s a demon.”

Maze tensed, coming back to reality, pulling at stitches that were burning points of pain against her side. She still couldn’t open her eyes, but from the smell and the sounds she understood she was on Linda’s couch. They had done as she asked; they hadn’t brought her to the hospital. Something itched in her chest, and she pushed it down. _Not yet._

Linda spoke, but Maze’s head hurt too much, and she lost the words to the rushing sound in her ears. But Ella’s strident tone cut through the haze.

“She’s my friend! That’s all that matters.”

They continued to talk, but Maze could no longer work out the words. This was far from the worst injury she’d had, but Linda’s couch was more comfortable than any cave she’d crawled away from a battle to shelter in. 

The pain started to rise again, and she groaned, her hand coming up to stop the glare of the living room lights. She was a creature of the night, and it was too bright here, sometimes. But the soft, concerned sounds of the women in the room wrapped around her mind, blurring the pain and guiding her back into sleep.

* * *

The wasteland was dull, flat, and featureless. Great, predatory winged beasts dipped down to nip at Maze as stranger things, buried deep in the swamp, rose to grab at her feet. She had been walking for Lilith knew how many hours, long enough her leathers were caked in grime and several ash storms had made her lose her way.

Not that there was anything to find in such an empty, endless place.

She should have stopped to rest, but she feared the hungry earth might swallow her up if she paused even for a moment. She should have drank from the murky pools, but she feared what poison might lay within them. And she was too weary to hunt.

What was the point of leaving if she just ended up dead?

The winds rose as the ash fall grew heavier, and she was forced to seek shelter, finding a small rocky outcropping to hide under. In the total darkness, she could hear nothing but the rush of the storm, could feel nothing but the grime battering her chapped lips and the pain in her stomach.

And she slept, for a time.

She woke to growls and the putrid breaths of a stinking creature washing over her face. She kicked at it, trying to throw it off, but it was strong, and managed three deep scratches across her abdomen before she pulled her knife from its holder and jammed it between its glowing, red eyes.

She panted harshly, touching the wounds, her fingers coming away wet. When the storm died down, she disemboweled the creature, drawing its intestines into strings. And, roughly, with her own blade, haphazardly stitched the lacerations together.

She tried to continue on, but only made it a few paces before she fell to the ground.The winged beasts circled closer and closer and the creatures of the deep reached up to ensnare her. She thought she would die there, but then she saw a light, saw a different sort of beast, wings not gray and well-suited to blend into the wastes, but white and shining.

And he had reached down to offer her his hand.

* * *

Maze stirred, clawing herself up from the darkness again, legs kicking out, hand reaching instinctively for her knife. It found nothing, and she froze. She didn’t know where she was; she didn’t know where she was, and—

“It’s okay, Maze,” Ella said, sounding exhausted.

_Ella._ It was Ella. And Ella _knew_, now.

Maze pried her eyes open to watch her cautiously. “Gonna try to exorcise me?” She didn’t want to believe that, but, still, suspicion was her first instinct.

Ella shook her head. “You’re my friend.”

Maze frowned and tried to sit up, only managing to pull on her stitches again. She hissed, then, angry at her show of weakness, scowled. She slumped back to the couch, cursing her defeat. “Not running for the hills, then? Or Rome?” She chuckled at her private joke, but a twinge of pain shot through her that had nothing to do with the knife wound.

“Do-do you need water or food or I can…” Ella made to get up, and Maze, suddenly, panicked, fear spiking through her. Her oldest fear. That she would be left to die in the wasteland; that no one would ever come.

Ella was still watching her, a concerned look on her face that made the ache even worse. Maze cleared her throat. “I’m fine.”

Ella didn’t look convinced, but she settled back onto the couch. They sat in silence for a few more minutes, and Maze nearly fell asleep again, before Ella blurted, “I love my family a helluva lot, even when they’re being jerks, but-but…”

Maze stared at her, baffled, wishing she felt more annoyance than she did. What was she on about now? But part of her had a terrible suspicion.

Ella took a deep breath. “_But_ I know lots of people… _demons_… their families aren’t the best.”

Maze snorted. “That’s an understatement.”

Ella waited, seemingly for Maze to elaborate.

She sighed. “I am the first of the Lilim. When my…” She hissed. “The whelps, I made sure they didn’t get themselves killed, best I could.” Sometimes she failed, and though she’d tried to pretend she didn’t care…

She let her head thud against the back of the couch. “One by one, those that lived grew stronger, strong enough to catch their own meals, tend their own wounds. That’s all I ever was to most of them: survival.” She hadn’t told anyone about this, not even Lucifer, but the words forced themselves from her mouth like bile. “They formed their own bands, forgetting me, or else gave all their loyalty to Lilith, who’d never cared until they were _useful_ to her.”

She shook her head, and pain shot through her skull, but she breathed through it. “And when I couldn’t take any more… I left. And they called me a _traitor _for it,” she spat.

Ella nodded sadly. “You saved my life year before last,” she said quietly. “Didn’t ask for anything, didn’t make me owe you.”

“Course not,” Maze said gruffly. “You’re…”

“Family,” Ella said. “I mean... if you want?” She buried her head in her hands. “I just mean that I was the little sister that everyone took care of, and if your brothers and sisters won’t appreciate you, _I_ will.”

Maze gaped at her.

Ella stammered, “This-this is silly. I should just—”

“Thanks, Ella,” Maze said. “It…” She trailed off. She didn’t know what else to say, but Ella seemed to know what she meant.

And she smiled, this human who knew Maze was a creature of the night, but who gave her light anyway.

Her eyelids were heavy, and she felt the darkness call to her again. But this time it didn’t seem so endless. Someone would be there when she woke. She was sure of it.


End file.
